Data Monetization and Business Metamorphosis

Data has always been most important asset for any organization. But limitations on amount of data which can be stored, maintained and processed in cost effective and efficient manner has been constraining businesses to take their full advantage.  With the advent of various big data tools and technologies to overcome these limitations, data has become a real game changer. Think of google maps, all of the services offered by Google related to maps and spatial are impossible if they do not have that huge amount of digital data or they are not able to process it so efficiently.  

In this post, we will try to understand the highest levels of big data usage and understand how organizations are transforming themselves taking big data of their advantage.  Obviously, at the time, Google is best in this category. But, let’s take example of a telecom company to understand how they are selling their data to generate additional revenue and create new products to capture new markets and transform themselves. We will look at one of the world leader in the telecommunication sector Telefónica. You can visit below link and I am sure you will get it easily.   

http://dynamicinsights.telefonica.com/488/smart-steps

Rest of the post is just replicating the same information available at above link.

This telecom major has used the fact that people keep their mobile within few meters (less than 5 meters) from them. They collected mobile locations 24x7 and build a continuously updating data store. This database is transformed using some proprietary logic to make it anonymous, aggregated and extrapolated to avoid compromising people privacy without losing relevance. A software product is developed on top of this transformed database using big data technologies to perform so called Crowd Analytics. This crowd analytics is highly important in delivering insights for industries like retail sector having direct business correlation with foot fall rate. As per company it helps to deliver key business insights. Some examples are given below. 

• How does my store performance compare to the performance of the locations in which I trade?
• What is the best location for me to invest in opening a new store? And what format of store should I open?
• What are the best opening times and staffing profiles for each of my stores?
• Where are people travelling from to my stores?
• Are there specific areas that I should target my marketing campaigns? How should I vary my message in different parts of my catchment?
• Where am I competing for customers?
• What is the profile of the crowd passing through areas A, B & C where I am looking to place an advert? How does that change during the day and the week?

Company itself has started its transformation under a new division Telefónica Digital. It’s happening not only in telecom but in almost all industries, all size of organizations. Raise your interest and Google it, any specific industry, a little hard work will provide you a wealth of information on how organization are moving towards harnessing the power of big data. Good news, it’s a beginning of lots of innovation in and around data.

This post is end of the series “What business will do with big data?” However I will keep posting some interesting use cases from various industries in future.

What’s next?

We will explore “How to do it?”